Case study – Landing pages
Do you think we use our own tools, like the new Site Browser? Of course we do! And that’s how we find exciting new sites that we learn a lot from. For example this particular site which made us curious. How is it possible that they have created an awesome landing page only by using the Twenty Seventeen theme and 3 plugins? This is what we have found.
First of all, here is the site in our Site Browser:
As you can see, it only uses the Twenty Seventeen default WordPress theme and 3 plugins.
This site was created exactly 2 months ago and if you check it out, it’s just a full, great landing page*.
(*Short disclaimer: we have not examined the text contents of the page, only the looks)
The site is called webdesigncartel.com and here you can download what we have seen when we checked the page (it may have changed since the article was written).
Is it the theme?
Not so long ago we also wanted to create an awesome landing page for one of our other projects. After checking a couple of WordPress themes and site builder solutions we have finally found a good little theme to work with. It took a couple of days and a lot of customization till we could create a decent landing page, though it was not exactly what we had in mind before, but it was acceptable.
One thing is for sure, theme Twenty Seventeen (and many other free themes) are just not suitable for creating a good landing page. There are several reasons behind it, but mainly because WordPress was originally created to help bloggers and many themes’ features are created for this purpose. They are just not meant to be used as landing pages.
So what are the plugins?
First we checked Pixel Caffeine. As it quickly turned out this is a free plugin to manage your facebook ads. So clearly the site owner is getting visitors to this site by paid ads on Facebook and uses this plugin to manage that.
Then we have WPFomo. It’s an interesting little plugin (installed only 200+ times) where Fomo stands for “Fear of missing out“. Having a closer look at what this plugin does: it’s trying to create the “Fomo” effect on you. What does it mean? As you scroll down the page it randomly shows messages in the lower left corner telling you that someone has just purchased this product.
Have you ever booked a room on Booking.com? Then you know how frustrating and urging it can be when you see that a room just has been booked in the hotel you wanted to pick, leaving only one free room behind. Does it help you make your final decision? Sure it does! By giving you the mental image of loosing the last free room you will book it in no time. That’s how it works, basic human nature.
And then, the last plugin of the three was: Thrive Visual Editor.
Thrive Visual Editor
It quickly turned out that there is only one single element which makes this site shine. And that is Thrive. We have quickly made a Google search and it turned out that Thrive is probably the best solution on the market for Landing Page creation.
It’s basically a drag-and-drop editor where you can very quickly create any landing page you want. You just have to write all the text and the design is almost automatic, just a few clicks to put it all together.
By looking at this website, webdesigncartel.com, we really have no doubts how effective this tool is.
So what is the downside?
Of course there is a downside. It’s not free, which is really sad. As I mentioned earlier, once we have tried to find a good tool for landing page creation and we only had partial success. There is one good tool which is (partially) free, it’s called Elementor. And if you want to have a no cost solution to create a decent landing page, we recommend you try Elementor first. It’s the most intuitive free site builder on the market (it has a pro version though for money) and can give you good results.
However, seeing what Thrive is capable of, they are just not in the same league. Of course, Elementor is a site builder while Thrive is a landing page creator, and these two are very different categories. While Elementor is a great tool for building general pages, Thrive excels at creating landing pages.
So do you want to create landing pages?
That is one question you should ask from yourself. If you plan to create multiple sites and want to sell products or advertise affiliate partners, you may want to consider buying Thrive like we did. How much does it cost? There are various packages, you can check it out here. It depends whether you want to create only one landing page, or use it on multiple sites.
Have we bought Thrive ourselves? Well, yes, we just did that. I will be honest with you, I do believe that most of the time you can achieve almost the same results by using free tools. Most commercial tools are just not worth the price.
But regarding landing pages, we just couldn’t find any free tools that would match the capabilities of Thrive. And as we are opening new sites every month, this turned out to be one tool we just cannot substitute with a free solution.
4 COMMENTS
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Thanks for sharing this article.
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This post could detail so much more 🙁 Could you expand on it when you have time?|
You made some good points there. I did a search on the theme and found nearly all persons will agree with your blog.